


Arcana Mercennariae

by StellarRequiem



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Drunk Kissing, First Time, M/M, Relationship Over Time, drunk more than kissing, fill-in-the-blank between season 13 and 14, lolix, solving the mystery of what might have happened between season 14 and Chorus, some adult content, tarot card inspired theme
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-18
Updated: 2016-08-16
Packaged: 2018-07-24 18:36:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7518980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story told through traditional narration, and tarot card spreads:</p><p>To know what happened on Chorus, or what happened years before in an incident involving a nightclub and a ransom, is only to scratch the surface of Felix and Locus' long relationship. (I.E.  A fill in the blank fic exploring their relationship up to season 14, and what the hell happened AFTER season 14.)</p><p>(PLEASE NOTE the usage of names revealed in season 14.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: The Breaking Point of Back and Forth

**Author's Note:**

> TW: thoughts of suicide from non-narrator character

* * *

 

The Hanged Man and The Fool

 

* * *

 

You hate him. You really do. He is petty and petulant, the court jester, the fool. But you read somewhere, once, that the fool in actuality had the ear of the king—that he could say things, in his guise of nonsensical irreverence, that no one else could say. You see him with your captain, words so air-smooth, so elegant, so confident, and you see the king is listening.

**

You know him. You know where he will be and what he will do, because you have survived this long. Your king, your captain, is long dead, but not you, and not him.  He seeks the ear of those far more elevated than mere kings, now. Gods with gold stars on their dress uniforms.  Whether because of his lilting songs or despite them,  you are moved together to a new unit.  To a new king. A new mission. That he goes with you makes the transition easier, and together you survive your first skirmish, while several others don't.

**

You hate him, but the two of you are now a packaged set. As your brothers and sisters die around you, fail in various ways, and your new captain preoccupies herself with managing the new recruits who replace them, the two of you are given your own missions, together, more often than not. The scout and scout sniper. You work in staggered patterns through alien terrain, pushing ahead of the others, killing what you encounter, tracking what you don’t, paving the way ahead.

This war is becoming one of infantry, of constant, tireless movement.  The camps the two of you set at nightfall, to which the others will catch up, is the closest thing to a forward operating base you’ve known in what feels like years.

**

You lead him.

“What the _fuck?!”_

Gunfire rains around you, the burn of plasma sizzling on the air, and he is swearing. He slides up behind you, standing at your back. Your squad is twenty minutes back, you are alone with only him. You cannot save the others—it is them that must save you. And you cannot be sure they will—

You cannot be sure they will even survive, as you hold position, hours upon hours you hold, you hold, you hold. You hold the line that you have drawn, arbitrarily in the sand, until the reinforcements come. And they come. And you fight.

**

You hate him for tearing you away. You hate him for drawing you off in the direction your orders sent you, to hold the high ground while so many die below you.

You hate that he calls you _crazy_ for not wanting to go.

**

You protect him, stand at his back firing a gun painted in his colors, knowing that he is the last. That it is down to the two of you, that you have been separated, cut off, amputated, driven back, that you hold a last bastion of resistance on your own and your best chance now is to blow the bridge you stand on and flee into the heart of this alien world-flee, retreat, retreat—

You tell him: “ _Go.”_

**

You hate him for that he can feel so much in the wake of so much, in the aftermath, so much gore so much trauma so much death. You hate him that he swears and kicks and scoffs and breaks and laugh while you stand there, frozen inside yourself, sinking into your armor, knowing you will never feel safe outside again. You have seen too much now, of the world, and all you have left is to stay in your shell and, failing that, follow him. Or become the shell itself.

You tell yourself not to. In your head, you repeat your own name. It feels strange to you and foreign. He calls you by it—

“Ortez. _Sam._ We fucking lived.”

It almost calls you back.

**

You avoid him, staying beneath your armor well after the fight is over, hair sticking to you beneath your helmet. You sleep sitting up, back to back with him, guns in your hands, somewhere in the wilderness, knowing that it will be days if not weeks before anyone comes looking for you on this side of the bridge. You take turns keeping watch as you bleed out in your armor, so short on supplies, so short on ways to help yourself.

He falls asleep with his head lolling back onto your soldier, breathing labored. For an instant, he seems fragile.

**

You hate him because he can pull the world out from under you—and does, when you are at your most fragile. It has been four days. You move by day and go dark at night, moving back to the battlefield you fled in a wide arc, just in case you’ve been followed. Just in case it’s been overrun despite all your efforts. You need medical attention. You are concussed, confused. His words in your ear at night bewilder you. That he can laugh as often as he does disturbs you. You are tired and aching and a little bloodless—very sleep-deprived. And you make the call despite yourself—set down early. Make your camp, such that it is, “camp” more a position than a place, a way of orienting yourself around your partner, and resign yourself to the sleep you’re so starved for. Starved—that is what you are. In every possible way.

Your stomach feels hollow, and it is eating your broken body alive.

**

You worry for him. The same ailments that are tearing you down have made him delirious. His absent, smiled words as you fall asleep back-to-back with him in the undergrowth belay some terrible fracturing in his already fragile ego and tired mind. So you lie down beside him. Tell him to sleep, that you’ll take first watch.

You find you are not, in fact, back-to-back in the dark.

“Well hello,” he whispers in your ear, too close. And then the flat of his hand is clapped against your armor, fingertips brushing against the upper portion of your thigh. “Trying to keep warm?”

You roll away so aggressively that several of your body’s broken places scream, turning your head white with pain.

He laughs.

**

You hate him, for how badly he can scare you. For how scared he proves to be.

Six days, and the hunger has set in. You’ve gotten lost. You are no longer certain which direction whatever may be left of your forces lays in. You got turned around in the undergrowth, your HUD glitching over circuit damage in your helmet—your companion’s helmet entirely gone. You mis-trusted the direction of the dawn and now you are lost, what supplies you had have run out, the last edible piece of greenery you’d seen now miles behind you. And he is convinced that you will starve. He jokes about it, first. Then grows snide. And you realize, after hours of this, that the vitriol is a disguise: he has, in some ways, a hollow center—the negative space beneath an inflated ego, the air in the balloon of his irritating “charm,”—and it is full now, to bursting, with a crippling, despairing dread.

And it comes to fruition soon enough.

The one thing you are not completely out of is ammo. You have one clip left, each. He turns an unloaded pistol over and over in his hands. Loads it. Unloads it. Loads it. Turns off the safety in the light of setting alien suns.

“I’m _not_ going to starve,” he says, holding the pistol aloft. It takes you a blinking, uncomprehending moment—dangerously long—to understand.

Your heart turns to ice. Your stomach. Your mind to static. Something, some weird pressure, leaps up your throat from deep inside your chest and lodges just below your vocal chords, paralyzing your ability to speak. As if you even knew the words.

What you do know in your suddenly agonized, frostbit heart is that you cannot allow him to make good on his threat. Not now, not when it will leave you so alone. Not him.

You turn around, wrap his wrist in your so-much-larger hand, and disarm him. He cries out as you bend back his wrist—as the gun falls from his fingers.

“No,” you tell him, trying not to choke on the words, “you won’t.”

You will never let him.

But the words sound so much steadier than you feel, your heart beating like gunfire in your aching chest.

**

You need him, to get you through this. You never need him. You never depend. Trust—not depend. But you need him, now.

You arrived at dawn, and the base brass were shocked to see you alive. There was rushed medical attention, a meal, a blessed meal, a debriefing, aghast faces staring down at you, sitting on a gurney. Worried faces. A medic with a datapad, frowning at your answers.

The base they have erected on your battlefield is a small one, easily mobilized, a ramshackle FOB. They have only two medics on hand. One interviews you, one him. Both whisper to the commanders who will radio back to the powers that be. The powers that be will radio back to give you new orders—

You knew this, sitting in that gurney. That this was how it was supposed to be. But no new orders came.

They told you your psychological profile—

They told you instead to go home. That the war, for you, was over.

For you and Isaac both.

You were told that you would be shipped to the nearest space port tomorrow, and there is nothing for you now except to wait. If he is the Fool, you are the Hanged Man, suspended, waiting for nothing, no future you can conceive of, tied upside down in a limbo existence where even to fall would at least be a direction--something better than this waiting to part with all you've known for so long, incapable of moving yourself. Of acting. You can do nothing now but stand in a mobile camp module, like a storage crate with a single door, staring out into the sunset across a battlefield only half-cleared of gore, at a camp barely-manned, somewhere in the depths of which they have stowed away the armor they relieved you of.

The shell. In exchange for that last safe place, they gave the two of you a bottle of whiskey. You so rarely drink, but you do drink this, passing it back and forth, losing yourself in the smell of it. In the haze it puts into your head. You shouldn’t be drinking, your brain in the state it is, but you are. Drinking, with Isaac Gates beside you. Drinking more than he is. Watching his face in the setting sun. Knowing he is all you will take with you from this experience. This man you hate you need you avoid you follow you lead you protect you _want—_

The thought like a loss of gravity, you pause, clutching the bottle.

“Are you going to finish that or not, Ortez?”

Yes, you are.

You hate him, in this moment of loss—because you suddenly need to have him close.

 

 


	2. The Fullest Manifestation of What You Thought was Hate

* * *

 

The Lovers in Reverse

 

* * *

 

“Seriously? You’re going to drink the rest of it?” He complains, as you pull the bottle from his hands and bring it to your lips, imagining that the taste of him must be hidden beneath the alcohol, present just along the bottle's rim. You drink everything that’s left, hunting down that taste. The empty bottle clatters against the floor as you drop it—too loud for the small space where they have improvised you extra barracks in the form of two worn cots in crate and footlocker-lined module.

Your hands free, you seize him. Right hand on his arm pulling him toward you and around, to where you can catch his waist with your left, and hold him by it. Gates is so slender, the small of his back shaped too neatly to your palm.

**

As his back hits the wall, you crash into him. Pin him against a chest singing with the pain of a broken rib. Uncertain of your ability to execute the act, it having been so long since you've done it, you bring your mouth down on his and drink him in, taking in the flavor of his breath his lips his tongue, along with the heady spice of second-hand whiskey.

**

You do not leave him space to breathe. You leave yourself no room to think. His hand reaches out, groping along the wall until it finds the door controls. He seals the two of you in and shoves.

You hold him by his narrow waist as he drives you backwards, throwing you down, the pain bursting bright behind your eyes.  You fall onto the cot, and he joins you, straddling your thighs.

You discover that just now, he is bandages and bruises, and that his lip tastes like copper beneath the whiskey. That he is heady and hurting. He hurts _you_ every time he moves.

**

You hold him to you as if you could claw him out of himself and somehow keep him, wear him like armor, keep you safe—

Give him shape.

“Finally,” he hisses at you, and you swallow his words as you roll him over, burying him beneath you.

**

He is warm and close and small compared to you, with raking hands and a high, indulgent voice, airy and ragged with the sound of you inside him. He moves on your body dry, because of the constraints of where you find yourselves--aching, gritting his teeth and smiling before biting down on your shoulder your neck your lip. He whimpers in your ear, but he does not want to stop.

**

Push and pull and back and forth, you are lost to temptation. You know in your heart of hearts that this is not what it means to be lovers. This is an act born of circumstance, when he is one thing left for you to lose. What you are to _him_ is a mystery.  And the two of you, surely, are somehow backwards, upside down. But so is all the world, right now.

**

Gates cries out into your hair, from atop you, clutching your head against his chest as he moves. He is finished, gasping, when you are nowhere near such. He dismounts, shaking his head, lies back and pulls you down to him, kissing as his hands move. He takes your fingers in his—such delicate fingers they are—and closes your own hand around you.

“Finish what you start, Ortez.”

He basks in the moment in which you spill on him, looking so enormously satisfied, something admiring in his eyes.


	3. An Irrational Theft of Self

* * *

 

The Seven of Swords

 

* * *

 

“This is bullshit,” he says into the void of nightfall. He's dressed again, leaning in the doorway, breathing in the world that so nearly killed you while you rest on a cot, staring into the ceiling while slowly sobering, slowly processing what it is the two of you have done. You're not sure what to think of it, if it means something. If it will make it matter more when you go your separate ways. You are thinking too hard about it to answer him.

“Seriously,” he snaps, too loud, making sure you're listening, “we single handedly save this place—"

“Being the only survivors does not make our efforts the only ones that matter.”

“Whatever. You know what I mean. We end up half-dead in the alien Amazon to keep the Covenant out of this place, and they thank us by sending us home?”

“We failed evaluations.”

“So would half of the soldiers in the UNSC if they bothered to check.”

His vitriol captures your attention. You sit up, conscious of a hazy imbalance in your head. Too much to drink, too fast, on too-recent a concussion. He isn’t looking at you.

“We’re some of the best they have,” he mutters. “. . . it isn’t fair.”

“No,” you agree, missing the safety of your shell as you look past him and out the door to battleground beyond, “it isn’t. But there’s nothing we can do.”

**

Gates—Isaac, you should say, since you are no longer soldiers, no longer a unit, no longer a faceless layer of armor with only a rank and a surname—

 _Isaac_ explodes suddenly to his feet. He’s been squatting in the doorway, despondent, but now he’s a live wire.

“Yes there is,” he says.

“Is what?”

“Something we can do.”

You know, innately, that he is going to suggest something ridiculous, some venture from which there is no walking away, some wild wrong. You know that there is something abhorrent ready on his tongue. But desperation, you know, like whiskey, can make any temptation more palatable.

**

For the last three years, the UNSC has been your home. Now you are stealing from it. Isaac calls it “taking back what’s yours.” You think of it as the most senseless thing you’ve ever done. There is no war left to wear your armor in—

. . . But there is, you must admit, something to _having_ it. It was yours. In your darkest moments, it has been _you._

And so, you are going to steal it.

You creep along behind Isaac at nightfall. The younger man—so fresh-faced you sometimes wonder if he lied about his age when he enlisted—like a specter in the dark, a slender shadow ahead of you, ghosting in and out from between tents, modules, stacks of crates and weapons lockers.

You find no one guarding your armor. Why would they? How could they know how you need it, need the knowledge that you still have it, your shell? They were not on this battlefield with you, not this one, not the others, not one drop of the endless sea of bloodshed you have witnessed was shared with them, these people who decided to separate you from the armor that saw you through so much.

**

It occurs to no one to question how two scouts, isolated from their squad, lost for days, having shed every necessary item from their persons in that time, could have enough belongings to warrant a footlocker. No one stops you from climbing aboard your shuttle, your metal and Kevlar lifeline in your hand.

**

“Sam, the fuck? Calm down.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re sweating like a pig, asshole. Get it together.”

The footlocker is under your boots. The dock from which you will catch a ship home—or wherever it is you can still go at this juncture, not quite 30 and feeling 100, so far removed from your family by years and distance and the decisions you made—coming into view through the window.

They will check your belongings when you arrive.

**

Isaac rounds on you as you wait at the counter, staring into the back of someone’s head in front of you, a female soldier with shorn-short hair like yours. He grabs you by your collar, yanking you down to his level.

“You’ve got about five minutes to calm the fuck down. Can you handle this or not?”

A spark of something beyond nervous energy ignites in your chest.

“I’m fine.”

He snorts.

“Right. I’ll just say this again: get your _broken fucking head_ together _,_ Sam.”

“I’m _fine,_ ” you insist, for what must be the fifth time. The fiftieth. The hundredth.

“Christ. you know what? Just let me do the talking when we get there, okay? You can just stand there and play PTSD—you’ll be good at it.”

**

Isaac shrugs the footlocker up onto the counter.

“This is personal belongings for Ortez and Gates. Two pairs of boots, two datapads, last two care packages from my mom.”

“Any food?”

Isaac laughs.

“Like there’s extra fucking food on ‘Prime . . . _sir.”_

The officer at the counter scowls daggers into Isaac, but hey phase through him, for the most part—only the smallest twitch of his lip tells you what the words do, the way they burrow into him and stoke his own fury-masked nervousness. You know Gates. And you know that he is terrified. You can feel his rapid heartbeat in your chest like sympathy pains.

“No food, sir,” you confirm. Isaac glances sideways, rage in his dark eyes meant only for you. He’ll berate you later, you know, insist that he had this handled. You will know better, hold your head high, and ignore him. Even if the officer _is_ looking you up and down, evaluating you like a criminal, reading some sign of discomfort Isaac has been seeing for an hour; perhaps he’s seeing the sweat on your brow, or the tension in your shoulders. He can’t know that your posture is representative of a constant stress you’ve been bearing for years, now. Atlas with his head full of war.

“Anything local to the planet?” the officer finally asks.

“No, sir. No organics.”

“Any UNSC property?”

“Only the footlocker,” Isaac says. “But we were told we could keep that.”

The officer eyes the locker, squinting as if he could see through it. You cannot quite read his intent in his expression, but you imagine that he is considering the hassle of going through a single locker so openly declared. His hand reaches for it. You can see the rest of your life in the motion, a trajectory of jail-time following his hand.

And then he stops, grunting.

“Ortez and Gates, you said?” he asks. Isaac nods, beaming.

“That’s us.”

The officer snorts.

“Welcome back to civilian life.”

**

Even when boarding your ship, destined for a larger dock, with farther-reaching transit, no one else questions your cargo.

You share a cabin with Isaac. He rolls his eyes when you open the locker on your bed, withdrawing a nondescript tan and green helmet—your blank face staring back at you, an X across its eyes.

“What, are you going to kiss it?” he says, but he moves to your side, and lifts his own helmet from the locker.


	4. The Bed You Made and Slept In

 

 

* * *

 

The Four of Swords

 

* * *

 

He swings a leg over you, pushing your datapad away as he settles in your lap.

“What are you doing?”

As if you don’t know.

This happens relatively rarely, considering that you are trapped together in this small space for so many hours of the day, but it _does_ happen, albeit almost exclusively on his terms. You can never decide if you want it, or if you fear it, or if you need it, and, if so, whether you need it too much.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

You resist the urge to sigh at him, this too-bright creature staring down at you. He is turning ragged and wild. His hair is growing out, little by little, a fuzzy strip running down the middle of his skull where he has chosen to let the army’s buzz cut lengthen.  You are curious how it feels—soft or sharp or some mix of the two that would match his personality.

“It's three in the afternoon.”

“And I can't fuck you while the sun is out, for some reason? What are you, a vampire? Besides… it’s not like there's anything else to do.”

His scowl as he says those words mirrors your own feelings. If you weren’t a hanged man before, you certainly are now. Days drag by with you all but trapped in this month-to-month motel room with Isaac and his chatter and his venom. That today he wishes to fuck you rather than resent you is a relatively rare occasion. That he will turn immediately venomous and strike at you should you refuse him, you know, is the price you pay for the change from the monotonous routine that has been closing like forest-silence around you. You are lost, again, since your discharge. And there is no base to return to.

**

“We need work,” you tell Isaac. Not for the first time.

“You keep saying that,” he snaps, “like _you_ don’t already have it.”

People are wary of veterans. Assume they are damaged. Isaac remains unemployed, irritable and bored, while you have been more fortunate due to appearance only:  On weekends, you have found steady if meager income in the purposeless work of bouncing at concerts and clubs. Your size and scar and military haircut render you a prospect very few people, no matter how recklessly inebriated, will choose to contradict. But it's numbing work, exhausting. You dislike the noise and the chaos, like war but all wrong, surreally mixed with joy and libido and endorphins and alcohol. And none of it distanced by a helmet.

When you come home from this job at 4:00 am, exhausted, the fact that Isaac is even _in_ the room when you so badly want to be alone, is crippling.  From four to 5:30, it’s not uncommon for you to lock yourself in the bathroom in the dark while he sleeps in the room beyond. Eyes closed, you absorb isolation.

**

Tonight he is dangerous. He kicks over the trashcan beside the desk, snarling something incoherent before falling against the TV stand, hip against the counter, face in his hands, seething.

“I am going to murder you,” he mumbles, “if I don’t get the fuck out of here soon and find something to do.”

“How is the job-hunt?”

“Everywhere I’ve looked can fuck themselves, that’s how.  I mean, what do they want from me. . . Retail? Sure, fuck it. Three years fighting the fucking Covenant, I can use a fucking price scanner.”

“You would lose your mind in retail. We have real skills . . . We both need _real_ work.”

“Killing aliens doesn’t have a hiring office though does it? Let it go, man. Seriously, what is with you and our ‘skills?’”

Simple:  They're all, you’ve realized, that you have. A talent for war and stolen armor—these are your sole credentials. But you won't tell him that. He won't be able to stand the thought, and he will be insufferable because of it.

**

“You keep coming back to this _real_ work shit because you _miss it,_ genius.” He informs you, one tirade later that has sent him, hissing and furious, into your arms.

“I do not _miss_ war, Isaac.”

He laughs, venomous and flippant all at once, shifting a little in your lap, an intentionally casual gesture that achieves its desired result only too easily.

“Oh please. Tactics and strategy and shit—you got off on that. Your brain is _good_ and broken that way. . . No wonder you left a fuckton of pieces of it back there.”

The words squirm beneath your skin.

“So did you,” you growl, trying to push them back at him, and he knows what you are saying. That you are remembering nights in the bunks and on scouting missions when he woke gasping, clutching a combat knife he kept beside him as he slept, breath shaking in and out of him. Isaac's sense of control, as you know it today, was built as a reaction to his fear. He sang songs to generals, your fool, because he needed the assurance. He covered your six because he needed you at his.

“Oh, that’s fucking rich,” he seethes. “Screw this.”

He stands in a rush, snarling the words into your face, teeth bared like a trapped animal. He would be happy to hurt you if you continue to provoke him. He might not succeed, but he will happily try. Living with him like this is to lay on a bed of nails. You have to be careful of how you move.

**

“Fuck me.”

“Good morning.”

“ _Fuck me_ I'm _bored_ to _death._ ”

Isaac is glaring at you, demanding, from the other bed. You drag yourself from between your sheets to appease him: He has a fair point. There is no better way to start your morning so long as you’re living like this, inseparable but static. And your body is morning-eager besides.

You stand over his bed and yank away the sheets, and Isaac, gratified by your unspoken consent, pulls you by your waistband until you are on your knees in his bed, and drags down your pants with agonizing rapidity, only to replace them with the warm wet of his mouth.

Moving from one bed to another at occasional intervals—even as your nights are filled with music and people and noise, and all you want to do is be silent and alone, perhaps to put on your shell and hide in it—is now how you spend your days.


	5. The Consensual Nature of Damnation

* * *

 

The Devil

 

* * *

 

Your first encounter with Aria O'Neil is outside a club you’re working. She swings out of a heavily armored sports car, a vision of bright jewelry and expansive tattoos so eye-catching as to be outdone only by her hair, which is as red as the fires of hell. She drifts more than walks toward the VIP entrance, entourage in tow, and one of the other bouncers chases away half the line to make room for her.

“Who is this?” you ask him.

“Owner, dumbass. Show some respect. And no one gets within ten feet of her until she's in the building, then it's five, so watch it.”

You do. You stay well away from her, only nodding as she passes. But the gesture is too much. She stops to look at you.

“You,” she says, “are new. Who are you?”

You offer her the alias you have been using for everything but gathering your UNSC benefits, lest they come after you for your theft of their property. Lest your parents realize you're free to come home.

Aria hums.

“Walk with me,” she says. “I like the look of you.”

You step in beside her, uncertain of everything except that you cannot refuse her. You know of her family—one of two that fights to run this city—and you know she is dangerous in ways you are not equipped to fight. And you know you need whatever offer it is she is able to make you.

“Explain to me,” she declares as you move into the dark cacophony of her club, “what it is you do here.”

**

It is your bed of swords that leads you to the arms of the Devil, but it is your loyalty and uncertainty that drives you to take Isaac with you.

“ _This_ is your partner?” she says, scathing, as she takes in his slender frame. Isaac smiles his best.

“He's the muscle,” he says, shrugging, “I'm the face. Well, that and the cavalry. He’s more of a . . . tank.”

She hums.

“Who says I need cavalry?”

“Well, you _are_ looking into hiring a couple of discharged marines when you could get perfectly good mindless thugs off the street.”

The corner of her mouth twitches.

“Marines, so you say.”

Isaac glances at you sideways, looking for some idea you can’t convey in silence: your names. The alias you gave Aria was _James_ , and for Isaac, you offered _Leon_. Perhaps she could hear how untrue they were on your inexpert tongue.

“You've already lied about what I should call you, why should I believe such an enticing story as soldiers for hire?”

“Look, Ms. O’Neil: The names are exactly why you _should_ believe us. The whole reason we have them—Well, you see, the UNSC doesn’t really take to people who run away with fully customized armor.”

She sits up very suddenly in the luxurious chair in which she's been reclining.

“You have access to UNSC issued armor?”

“Fully loaded,” Isaac declares, grinning.

“And weapons?”

“No,” you interject, surprised by the growl that is your frankness, “but we can support what _you_ have.”

“I never said I had any such thing.”

“You didn't need to.”

You can feel Isaac's eyes on you, making it that much harder for you to continue looking into Aria’s without flinching. He's impressed. He will scoff at you, later, mock your willingness to bluff, but you will remember this feeling when he does: That envious awe is warm on your face and in your heart.

**

Aria O'Neil is a queen among criminals, and she knights you with simple orders: You are to defend a shipment of goods, the nature of which she does not disclose, and see them safely to her. You are to use deadly force if need be. Then, if you do well in this, you will launch an assault on a rival's stockpile of the same. The strike will be spectacular and military in its execution, shock and awe the order if the day.

This is not what your training was meant for.

This is not who you were raised to be.

But you are trapped, and her offer is an open door. To an uncertain Isaac's surprise, you agree.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Was the name Aria supposed to be a Mass Effect reference? No. Am I keeping it anyway now that I've realized it is? Yes.


	6. Punishment for A Crime Not Committed

* * *

 

Justice in Reverse

 

* * *

 

Inside your shell, you feel like someone else. You’d never noticed this in the army, surrounded by so much else, so much noise so much blood so much tedium so much marching. But you are someone calm inside of it, rather than someone who appears calm, or calms others. You are someone strict and even dangerous. You are someone bold and unrelenting. You are someone ordered, for you take orders, and they are clear, and they are not easy, but they are everything. They become your alpha and omega, and that they relegate you to the roll of soldier and only soldier rather than person is a fair and even trade that you have been making for years.

One of your first captains began it. _You are nothing but a suit of armor and a gun,_ he told you, once. The same man Isaac first learned to sing his will to. He never met with the same kind of resistance, communicating his thoughts, his person, as you did.

**

You know what you are doing for Aria. You know that you are a criminal now. You know, also, that the people you kill and harass are criminals, too. You can live with this as you have lived with so much else, and Isaac, ever beside you, is learning quickly not only how to live but to revel.

“Take it easy, S—Locus,” he tells you on one mission. “Do you really think getting rid of these guys is a bad thing? Sit back and enjoy the show.”

“It’s work. Not a show.”

“ _Right,_ right. The fireworks must just be—” he pulls the trigger on the sniper rifle he’s pulled from your back and a flammable crate at your oppositions’ backs ignites “—a job perk.”

**

The man who catches you is a warehouse worker. He isn’t supposed to be here in your crossfire.

“Oh, fuck me,” says the mercenary beside you, one of Aria’s better-equipped underlings, though he has nothing on his person that measures up against what you and Isaac are bearing. You’re not sure, looking at him, if he could even take the weight of real armor—though, you suppose, Isaac doesn’t much look like he could, either.

His codename is Max. Before now, you have never had any quarrel with him. These soldiers that fight beside you now are not your brothers. They are not even partners: they are coworkers. Loose allies in the same deadly game that you are all well paid to play. But you do not dislike them.

Max lifts his rifle, and the warehouse worker crumples. The words on his lips might be prayers.

“Wait,” you order him.

“What the fuck? Why?”

“Because you don’t know that he saw anything.”

“I didn’t!” the man stutters. “I saw you came in, I saw you shoot up some guys guarding a crate in the back, I don’t know who they were. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you’ve been storing.”

“Why were you here at this hour?” you demand. He swallows.

“I—”

“Do not lie to me.”

“I was fucking with the time-clock. Trying to get myself some more hours. I’ve got a family, and—”

“Quiet.”

The man whimpers. Max sighs beside you, and jerks his gun from beneath your armored hand.

“Right,” he says, “that sucks and everything, but we were told no witnesses.”

“He isn’t a witness. He can’t have seen us properly from this angle, and he can’t tell anyone what he saw here without incriminating himself. He’s safe.”

“So? What are you gonna do, let him leave?”

“You’re going to escort him out.”

Max starts laughing.

**

“Go.”

The worker runs. You let Max’s unconscious body slide from where you pinned him against the wall in the tussle to the ground, a heap of human being you will surely pay for harming. But you maintain what you’d said already, when Isaac finds you like this: the man wasn’t a witness. Not really.

He didn’t deserve to die for this.

“ _Deserve?”_ Isaac is yelling at you. “ _He_ didn’t _deserve—_ what about what we deserve, asshole? What the fuck do you think is going to happen to us after this?”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Oh, you fucking _lunatic,_ NOTHING is fine! We are fucked, Sam. We are _fucked . . ._ I am not helping you out of this. You are so on your own.”

“I know.”

**

She burns when she’s angry, a quiet, superheated flame. Aria’s hair is red, but her fire is blue. And her eyes are ice.

“Do you know why I hired soldiers?” she asks you. You are without your armor—no one is permitted to be armed in her presence—three men and one woman very nearly your size surrounding you, their hands behind their backs, patience in their eyes. Aria stalks back and forth behind her desk.

“Efficiency,” you answer.

“No,” she snaps, halting so sharply is as if motion itself has forgotten her. “I hire soldiers for two reasons. Power, and obedience. Define the word _witness_ for me.”

“A relevant witness to a crime—”

“A _witness_ is a witness!” she shrieks suddenly. “This is not a courtroom. This is not a thought experiment. This is my business, and you have compromised both it and one of my better men. That is not what I hired you for, _soldier._ ”

She pauses her tirade, watching you, predatory. She waits for you to speak, to beg, to sway whatever justice she has in mind for you. You say nothing. You have already made your choice.

“You’re very fortunate,” she says, now in a whisper, her tone as black as the emptiness of space, “that you are useful to me.

"You all,” she looks at your captors, “remind this man that a soldier is only as good as his armor and his orders. Perhaps he will remember one, that way, the next time he wears the other.”

She strides out of the room as the other four struggle to bring you to your knees.

**

Isaac picks you up, leans over to push the door open for you, pulls your sleeve to help you into the car, because you are struggling to see around the fingers holding together your bleeding face.

“Holy _shit,”_ he cries. You tell him:

“Drive.”

**

He looks almost dismayed for you as he discovers what’s been done. The shape the bandage takes. The way your armor has become your face, retribution for the choices you’ve made.


End file.
